Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Current cloud computing services may be stopped and then restarted over again when moving between virtual machines that have different capabilities such as memory and API types. Accordingly, components that can't be distributed between servers (e.g., as may often be the case with database services) may be run on the largest hardware virtual machine so that they can reasonably handle peak usage conditions. The alternative to selecting virtual machines based on peak usage conditions is to face a significant delay and loss of transient state data. Such delay and loss of transient state data may be due to services being stopped and then restarted during switchovers to larger hardware virtual machines.
Accordingly, current cloud computing services may typically be run at all times on virtual machines selected to be capable of handling peak usage conditions. However, virtual machines selected to be capable of handling peak usage conditions may only need maximum resources for less than five percent of the time. For example, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) pricing takes advantage of this to some degree with a “large” virtual machine priced at four times the price of a “small” virtual machine and an “extra large” virtual machine priced at eight times the price of a “small” virtual machine.